The impacts of COVID-19 on food safety

Hello, my name is Patrick Bird. I'm the principal consultant at PMB BioTek Consulting. I'm also a consultant for AOAC International. My consulting group focuses on the microbiology field, and we work with contract laboratories, method developers, and industry to really develop new technologies or optimize the ones they're already using to better fit their needs.

I spent 15 years in a contract laboratory setting, and most of these in research and development. My group's focus was to work with method developers such as Thermo Fisher Scientific to take their assays and further optimize them for specific industries or to validate them as part of a certification process for AOAC, Health Canada, or one of the iso-governing agencies such as MicroVal or AFNOR.

As a consultant, I continue to do that work with method developers, as well as my work with AOAC International where I help develop validation programs. In 2020, AOAC launched an Emergency Response Validation to certify methods for detecting SARS-CoV-2 on environmental surfaces.

Over the last year, we suspected that COVID-19 was not transmissible on environmental surfaces, but industry had come to AOAC and identified it as a need, so that they could monitor their environments to ensure that the food safety supply chain remained open. So, AOAC set about identifying experts from various government agencies in the U.S. and China.

We had experts from the EPA, the CDC, and the FDA participate in helping us develop a certification program where we could evaluate multiple methods in a single validation study. This was the first viral validation study that AOAC had conducted.

There were a lot of things that we had to learn as we developed this program and working with those experts and companies such as Thermo Fisher, that had developed assays for the clinical diagnostic market and were transitioning them to the food safety market, was really critical to having the program be successful. Ultimately, we ended up having seven methods that achieved certification.

I really see that there's two separate impacts from COVID-19 in the food safety industry. The first is global implications of testing for COVID-19. So, domestically here in the U.S., we don't anticipate that there will be regulatory requirements to monitor food packaging surfaces for COVID-19.

But in China, they've already developed standards and requirements to test food surfaces in food packaging. Will other countries take the same approach, such as India, that are very large producers of food that are consumed globally? We're not sure yet exactly what that could hold. As for the technology that's out there, I do feel it's suitable, it just would have to be transitioned from surfaces to food safety testing.

The second impact is the type of technology I think we will be using in the future. For the last 20 years, we've been looking at results from a binary standpoint, presence or absence of a certain pathogen in a product or in a facility.

I think COVID-19, with all the variants that are out there and some being more contagious or pathogenic than others, has taught us or reminded us that we need to start looking at more than just “is it there”. It's what is there and where does it come from.

Technologies such as next-generation sequencing, which we already have, unlocks that information for us. It can tell us if a pathogen has antibiotic resistance markers, if it has certain virulence genes that will make it more likely to make people ill. We can also use that information to track where it came from in the supply chain and whether it's transient in specific facilities.

I think COVID-19 was really a reminder to the food safety community that the technology we use right now may be good for today, but it may not be acceptable in six months, one year, two years, and that we need to continue that evolution and really understand the data we're getting.